Patriotic Fire (11 page)

As the intelligence of a British invasion of Louisiana unfolded, the problems exacerbated, because Claiborne began to fear that—as the British had implied—Creoles (especially the Spaniards) might not only refuse to help defend the city but actually join the enemy. When Claiborne communicated that unpleasant prospect to Andrew Jackson, it could not have been reassuring news for the general.

T
he American attack on Barataria arrived at just after daybreak on September 16, 1814, the morning after Jean and Pierre Laffite had fled. The invasion force, organized by Commodore Patterson, consisted of the schooner-of-war
Carolina,
six gunboats, and a number of barges carrying Colonel Ross’s men of the 7th Infantry Regiment. Having dropped down the Mississippi, the flotilla entered the gulf through the Southwest Pass and made for Grand Terre.

Ashore, and on the privateers’ ships anchored in the harbor, anxious men waited with their cannon at the ready, matches lighted, wondering if the approaching fleet was British or American. Laffite’s instructions had been to fight if it was the British but, if American, not to resist. He had felt certain that his offer to help defend the country against the British would be accepted, the requested pardon bestowed, and the Baratarians’ stores of prize property respected, but it certainly didn’t look that way now. As the ships neared, word rang out that they were American, and so the Baratarians began to scramble for any means of escape—pirogues, rowboats, gigs, anything that would float—and headed west and north toward the trackless marshes.

“I perceived the pirates were abandoning their vessels and were flying in all directions,” said Patterson. “I sent in pursuit of them.”

Most got away, but about eighty were captured and thrown into the calaboose, including Dominique You and many of the other ship captains. It took Patterson and his men four days to collect all the goods and merchandise in the Baratarian warehouses, which they loaded into the twenty-six captured privateer schooners. Afterward they burned the Baratarians’ buildings—forty in all—and sent everything up to New Orleans to be catalogued and filed for themselves as claims in the prize court. It was quite a haul for Patterson and Ross—estimated at more than $600,000, a considerable fortune today—and that was the end of Barataria, though not of the Baratarians.*
 
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Seven

T
he rendezvous of the British invasion armada was a sight to behold when it converged at Negril Bay, Jamaica, in November 1814. The pride of the navy, more than sixty vessels—from the huge eighty-gun ships of the line such as
Tonnant,
Admiral Cochrane’s flagship, to fighting brigs and frigates and armed troop transports, as well as dozens of cargo ships to carry off the millions in goods and merchandise they expected to capture at New Orleans—rested at anchor, each with a large Union Jack snapping in the breeze above the sparkling azure waters and tall promontories of this safe harbor. Aboard a number of the ships was a small army of British civil administrators—judges, Indian agents, colonial secretaries, and their minions—schooled to deliver His Britannic Majesty’s intended decrees and edicts to a defeated and cowed Louisiana population. There was even an acting governor, who had brought with him his five “fashionable, marriageable” daughters. This bureaucratic host came complete with a printing press to compose the edicts and decrees, along with an editor and printer.

Also aboard many ships were the wives of British officers, invited to see the show.*
 
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At night, on deck, regimental balls and dances were often held to the tunes of musical bands, and colorful lanterns swung from the shrouds and other rigging. It was said that the password and challenge during this period was “beauty and booty,” which some authors perhaps rightly have interpreted as “rape and plunder,” an allusion to the dark affair at Hampton, Virginia, earlier in the year.

In the convoy, sailing down from the affairs at Washington and Baltimore, was Lieutenant George R. Gleig, a nineteen-year-old Oxford dropout who had been commissioned in the 85th Light Infantry Regiment. Three times wounded with Wellington’s army in Spain and France, Gleig kept a detailed journal of his experiences. Despite the death of their leader, General Ross, Gleig recorded that the British soldiers and sailors were filled with optimism during their passage south. As they neared the equator, the men were treated to hazing associated with the traditional initiation into the Order of Neptune.*
 
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And on Gleig’s ship they also managed to catch a large shark—considered a delicacy, if only because it was fresh food.

When the ships from France and England arrived in Jamaica on November 24 and anchored beside those that had come down from the Chesapeake, it was one of the largest such gatherings yet assembled at sea, including the Spanish Armada. It was said that the entire of Negril Bay seemed taken up; that one could almost step from ship to ship without getting a foot wet. The scene on the beaches had taken on a sort of carnival atmosphere: dozens of small boats coming and going; large ships constantly signaling one another with semaphore flags or “shouting trumpets” (megaphones). Many officers had pitched tents, or marquees, or even built grass-roofed huts on the beach, and the free Jamaicans were selling tropical foodstuffs as well as other things: papayas, star apples, oranges, pineapples, bananas, fresh fish, sea turtles, rum, sugarcane, nuts, coffee, pimientos, wood carvings, dyed kerchiefs, and, inevitably, the services of women.

Aside from the 10,000 sailors and 1,500 marines of the fleet, also aboard the ships were 8,000 British soldiers of the invasion army, with another 2,700 sailing close behind. They were some of the most famous regiments in the army: the 4th (King’s Own), 24th (Royal Fusiliers), 95th Rifles (who wore bright green jackets instead of the traditional red coats), 85th Light Infantry, 44th (East Essex), and the 93rd Highlanders, numbering 1,100 men, each of them by regulation over six feet tall, dressed in tartan trousers and wearing Scots’ tams on their heads. To cap it off were two cavalry squadrons of the 14th (Duchess of York’s) Light Dragoons. Also in the mix were two astonished regiments of Jamaican “colored troops,” the 1st and 5th West India.

Still a few days behind at sea were three more regiments: the 70th, the 40th, and the 43rd. For the moment, all these soldiers were under the command of Major General John Keane, the thirty-one-year-old son of a baronet and member of the House of Lords, who—obviously with some help from his powerful father—had entered the army as a captain, at the age of thirteen! Keane knew his command was temporary, since General Ross’s true replacement, General Edward Pakenham, was presently coming across the ocean, but until he arrived Keane was in charge, along with Admiral Cochrane, whom one early historian characterized as “a ruthless and indefatigable Vandal.” This was an ill-fated situation for the British army because, being somewhat cowed by the elder admiral’s prestige and strong demeanor, Keane acquiesced to Cochrane’s intention to land the invasion force in an amphibious operation just below New Orleans, which, in turn, influenced the calamity that followed.

Cochrane had formed his determination after learning of Jackson’s victory at Mobile and the capture of Pensacola, which foreclosed that route of approach (as Jackson had earlier observed, that would have been the obvious course “for any true military man”). Although Cochrane had intelligence from a spy in New Orleans that he could easily ascend the Mississippi River in his ships, “with only two small forts to oppose you,” he was skeptical. He quickly realized that none of his larger vessels could get over the bar at the river’s mouth, a hundred river miles below New Orleans; that navigation on the Mississippi was slippery going upstream; and, in addition, who could tell what forces the Americans might muster against him once they learned that he was trying to get up the river? He also understood, once he got to Jamaica, that the efforts to turn the Baratarians to the British side had failed, putting Barataria Bay out of the picture so far as an easy invasion route to New Orleans went. He doubtless also had been informed through spies of Jackson’s public calls for troops from Tennessee and Kentucky, which made it improbable that the invasion force would be facing only a few “undisciplined militia,” as the spy had suggested.

Having ruled out other approaches, Cochrane pored over his charts and maps and decided that the most sensible way into New Orleans lay through Lake Borgne, and from there to ascend one of the various bayous that flowed into it just below the city. This would require a herculean effort for almost everyone concerned, since Lake Borgne was shallow and the entire army would have to be rowed in small boats across some sixty miles of treacherous open water. But there was no getting around it from the admiral’s point of view, and so while in Jamaica he set about buying or building forty shallow-draft barges to transport the army from the big ships to the point of invasion.

By this time the whole adventure seemed to be turning into a risky proposition, which more prudent men at that point might have abandoned. To achieve victory Cochrane surely must have assumed they would need complete surprise. But what if the bayous were all obstructed? What if he was discovered? After all, it was not easy to hide a 10,000-man army, even in the remote wilds of the Louisiana coast of 1814, and an amphibious landing under fire was (and still is) the most dangerous of all military operations. Yet Cochrane had his orders, which were to invade, conquer, and secure Louisiana and the Mississippi River for the British crown, and he believed he had the most skilled, best-equipped, best-trained, bravest, and most experienced troops in the world.

There was something more: the aforesaid beauty and booty. The notion had to have crossed Cochrane’s mind of the fabulous prize money he personally would receive from the sale of the goods piled up in New Orleans warehouses—estimated to be worth some $15 million.*
 
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As admiral commanding, Cochrane would get the lion’s share, but with that much at stake it must also have been on the minds of all those 20,000-plus soldiers and sailors, too, who would likewise get their cut. And so with only Cochrane and General Keane and their staffs to ponder the formidable obstacles, the men of the fleet and their cargo of soldiers pressed on, seemingly blissfully unaware of the perils.*
 
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But these were confident, determined—even arrogant—men, the vanquishers of the mighty Napoleon, immolaters of the American capital. Listen to Lieutenant Gleig’s journal entry for November 26, 1814: “In half an hour all the canvas was set, and the ships moved slowly from the anchorage, till, having cleared the headlands, and caught the fair breeze, they bounded over the water with the speed of eagles, and long before dark the coast of Jamaica had disappeared.”

Had Gleig and his comrades in arms fully understood the character, courage, and indomitable will of Andrew Jackson and his cobbled-together crew of Tennesseans, Kentuckians, New Orleans lawyers and merchants, “undisciplined militia,” U.S. Army regulars, free men of color, and Baratarian “pirates,” they might have worried some.

A
s the Canada geese and migratory ducks began to arrive in the Gulf Coast marshes and the hardwood trees finally flamed into a riot of color, Andrew Jackson was getting fidgety. Despite the pleas of Governor Claiborne and others, he had continued to make his headquarters at Mobile, convinced that “any true military man” would first land the British army there or at Pensacola or some point farther west, then march cross-country to Baton Rouge, above New Orleans, and fall upon the city from the north, rather than try to attack it from the swampy morasses to the south. He was wrong, of course, but could not know it at the time; all he
did
know, in fact, was that there was likely a large British fleet bearing down on him, carrying an army of Wellington’s veterans, while he could muster only a couple of undersized regiments of U.S. regulars, militia from Tennessee and, he hoped, Kentucky, as well as an uncertain number of volunteers, conscripts, and raw recruits of dubious loyalty from New Orleans.

To an ordinary man of the time this surely must have been a terrifying prospect, but not to Andrew Jackson, who, as Teddy Roosevelt noted, “had hereditary wrongs to avenge on the British,” and he hated them with an implacable fury that was absolutely devoid of fear.

Many of the pleas for Jackson to come to the city and personally take charge were made by his old friend from his first days in Congress, the lawyer Edward Livingston—the same Edward Livingston who presently represented Jean Laffite and his so-called hellish banditi.

Livingston was a curious character, born into the wealthy and famous family of the Hudson River Valley who were among the Founding Fathers. After graduating from Princeton he became, in turn, a lawyer, a congressman, and later mayor of New York City, until, it was claimed, a trusted assistant mishandled city funds, which caused Livingston to go bankrupt and in 1804 leave New York for a fresh start in New Orleans. There he married into a wealthy Creole family, and because he spoke flawless French was accepted at all levels of social and political society.

Livingston was no particular admirer of Governor Claiborne and had recently organized a committee of defense, which vied with the legislature’s Committee of Public Safety, chaired by the governor. From this eminent position he argued persuasively and privately with Jackson to include Laffite and the Baratarians in the New Orleans defense force. Livingston’s reasoning was well founded; he cited Laffite’s written offer to have the Baratarians fight for the United States and the fact that many of the privateers were skilled artillerymen, having served aboard their fighting ships as cannoneers and, if worse came to worst, as cutlass men or pistoleers.

Jackson was as yet unmoved, but he finally responded to the calls from New Orleans on November 22 by saddling up with his staff and journeying over the dingy trails from Mobile in a pouring autumn rain, personally scouting out for himself any possible landing sites for a British invasion. By that time the general had become wracked with severe dysentery, an excruciatingly painful, emaciating—even life-threatening—disease that bore only a scant comparison to its milder cousin diarrhea.*
 
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When he arrived in New Orleans nine days later, gaunt and pallid, Jackson could barely stand up, but, cheered on by grateful crowds, he was able to ride into the city in a carriage thoughtfully provided by a wealthy landowner.

To some his appearance might not have inspired confidence: his clothes and boots were filthy from a week on the trail, his face was prematurely wrinkled for his forty-seven years, and his great head of hair had gone gray. He was sallow and appeared frail from the dysentery and from the bullet wound in his shoulder received during the disgraceful gunfight with the Benton brothers. But later that day, when he appeared on the balcony of his headquarters on Royal Street, there was something in his voice and his icy blue eyes that convinced the gathered crowd that the city’s salvation had arrived. In contrast to Governor Claiborne, who had tried to maintain leadership but often seemed wishy-washy to his diverse constituency, Jackson emitted an unshakable aura of defiance that few could mistake. From the moment he arrived he was like a rock in the surf of chaos and fear, and his very presence, wrote one newspaper (pilfering a phrase from the Song of Solomon), “was like an army with banners.”*
 
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With Livingston translating his words into French for the largely Creole crowd, Jackson “declared that he had come to protect the city, that he would drive the British into the sea or perish in the effort.” He told the citizens “to cease all differences and divisions and unite with him . . . to save the city. . . . If you are not for us, you are against us, and will be dealt with accordingly,” a dire warning to spies and wafflers. All these words “produced an electric effect,” and a cry arose from the streets: “Jackson has come!”

That very day Jackson got down to business. First he needed to supplement his staff to suit the emergency. Edward Livingston became an aide-de-camp and chief proclamation writer. Major Arsene Lacarrière Latour, a local architect, military engineer, and mapmaker, was also called into service to supplement Jackson’s own engineer staff officer Howell Tatum. Latour would become indispensable to Jackson because of his knowledge of the area; one year after the war he would write a firsthand account of the battle that has likewise become indispensable to students of the campaign. Other aides would be added in the days to come, including some surprising choices.